“As a moral reckoning with the Nazi past, however, Peeling the Onion is a failure – and not even an honourable one. For a writer who has built his entire reputation on his indictment of an older generation for supposedly evading responsibility, Grass shows little awareness of his own bad faith in concealing the shameful facts about himself. Though he constantly interrogates his younger self in a rhetorical manner, the older Grass does his best to avoid confronting the awful truth.”